I'd like to generate some passive income, or even hobby-based income. I dabble in web-sites and photography, and my wife crochets. However, I'm very bad at anything resembling sales, and worse at anything involving collections. (Did you know you can run a paper-route in the red?)

Is there a solution, or is it a choose one (no extra income) or the other (engage in sales)?

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/ is a blogger who I know has been contacted by stock photo companies about buying the photos she posts on Flickr. It's passive income in the sense that she takes the photos as a hobby, not as a speculative side job.

However, because she's a prolific blogger on many topics I'm too lazy to find the posts on the subject . But it's there somewhere.

For photography, get with a stock agency (NOT one of those "microstock" places that sell your stuff for $1). They handle sales, collections, all that messy stuff. You shoot, process, upload.

I've been doing photography since I was a teenager and am pretty serious about it, but my stuff isn't exactly commercial. I have some stuff with a stock agency. The sales are minimal at best, but hey. People who consciously shoot more saleable stuff do pretty well.

Of course there are people who make their living at it, but then it becomes a job, not anything resembling "hobby income" or "passive income".

Hm. I don't have any great answers for you. One book that I used to like was called The Incredible Secret Money-Making Machine. It talks a lot about different sources of passive income. I don't know how many of them are lazy, though.

I earn passive income through my blog's advertising programs and information products. But it's only passive in that I can do work in advance and make money off it later. If you want passive passive income, you basically need to buy something like a bond.

When I was a freelance writer, one magazine article that I wrote ended up being sold over and over again by the magazine--they had some kind of syndication deal--and I got royalty payments each time that happened. That was nice, and really what I would consider passive income as I had already been paid well for the article and then it generated additional income for a few years without me having to lift a finger. However, that additional income was totally unpredictable and entirely out of my control. Not something I'd want to count on, it was more like pennies from heaven.

The key seems to be to let others do the marketing for you. The "Web 2.0" company 37signals has had amazing success with a book they wrote, which is available in PDF only. They've sold 20,000 copies at $19 a pop, without really doing any marketing. But they have an established reputation, and a lot of bloggers cite them, so it's sort of the classic case of viral marketing: They announced the book on their blog, a bunch of other bloggers posted announcements about it, still other bloggers picked up on it from the first set of bloggers, and it took off from there.

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